International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis - E-Lib FK UWKS

HYPNOSIS, DISSOCIATION AND TRAUMA 149
If the state of mind occurring at the time of the trauma is altered or hypnoticlike,
the way memories are stored may be in¯uenced by this narrowness of
attentional focus. The range of associations may be more limited and therefore
those that exist more intense. Strong emotion, for example, which is usually
associated with traumatic memories, may in¯uence both storage and retrieval
Cahill, Prins et al., 1994). There is evidence that congruence in mood between the
state in which memories were stored and that in which they are retrieved improves
recall Bower, 1981). Similarly, another form of state dependency involves the
dissociative state itself. To the extent that individuals do enter a spontaneous
dissociative state during trauma, the memories may be stored in a manner that
re¯ects this state e.g. narrower range of associations to context). There may be
fewer cross-connections to other related memories Evans, 1988; Evans & Kihlstrom,
1973; Hilgard, 1986). Furthermore, retrieval should be facilitated by being
in a similar dissociated state, for example hypnosis. Trauma can be conceptualized
as a sudden discontinuity in experience. This may explain the reversibility of
dissociative amnesia with techniques such as hypnosis Spiegel & Spiegel, 1978;
Loewenstein, 1991).
That such amnesia for traumatic events does occur is most convincingly demonstrated
by Williams. She obtained hospital records of 129 women indicating
emergency room contact for sexual or physical abuse, and interviewed them an
average of 17 years later. The results were striking: 38% of the subjects did not
report the abuse that had been recorded, nor did they report any sexual abuse by the
same perpetrator. Indeed, 12% reported no abuse at all Williams, 1994). An
additional 16% 10% of the whole sample) of the women who did remember the
abuse, reported that there was a period in their lives when they could not remember
it Williams, 1995). In fact, if the analysis was conservatively restricted to only
those with recorded medical evidence of genital trauma and whose accounts were
rated as most credible in the 1970s), 52% did not remember the sexual abuse. It
should be noted that this lack of memory was not diagnosed as a dissociative
disorder, but the interviews were not designed to establish the presence or absence
of any psychiatric disorder, merely the presence or absence of traumatic memories.
It makes sense that mental processes which segregate one set of associations from
another might well impair memory storage or retrieval Kihlstrom, 1987).
SUGGESTIBILITY
The third component of hypnosis is suggestibility, a tendency to respond readily
and uncritically to social cues. The hyperarousal states in PTSD are analogous to
that. On the other hand, during trauma many people ®nd themselves in a `state of
shock', responding in an automaton-like fashion. In a traumatic situation, as people
narrow the focus of attention they tend to act without thinking about consequences.
The police, for example, frequently do not believe a rape victim's story because she
doesn't ®t their image of what rape victims should look like. A supposedly classic